The present application is related, generally, to systems and methods for managing employee absences. As used herein, the term “absence” generally refers to a period of time that an employee is away from or restricted from fully performing the job normally performed by that employee, and the term “absence management” generally refers to the case management process for facilitating the employee's return to the job and includes the continuing management of the employees' status until all medical restrictions have been removed and the employee returns to full-duty.
An employee absence is typically triggered when an employee suffers an injury or illness. Such an injury or illness is commonly referred to as an incident. The costs associated with an employee absence incurred by an employer include both direct and indirect costs, and are directly correlated with the profitability of the employer. The direct costs include items such as insurance premiums, medical expenses, legal expenses, sick pay, disability income and administrative fees. The indirect costs include items such as lost productivity, overtime, replacement worker expenses, investigation expenses and decreased product quality. The costs associated with employee absences continue to escalate, and are estimated to exceed $1 trillion per year in the United States.
To improve profitability, employers have traditionally opted to focus the majority of their efforts on improving functions or departments that generate revenues, often devoting little or no attention to the practice of absence management. However, given the increasingly negative effect that employee absence costs are having on the bottom line of many employers, greater efforts are now being directed to proactively managing employee absences to reduce the costs associated therewith.
Although many employers now realize the strategic importance of absence management, the effective implementation of absence management has been relatively difficult. Absence management as currently practiced by many employers is a very fragmented, regulatory laden, form-burdened, manual process that involves a number of different entities. Such entities can include, for example, a case manager, human resource personnel, physicians, physical therapists, occupational therapists, attorneys, insurance carriers, third-party administrators, and governmental personnel. Absence management can require both extensive internal (e.g., department to department, employer to employee) and external (e.g., employer to physician, employer to attorney) communications, and each entity involved in the process can generate a great deal of information that collectively comprise the content of a particular case.
The fragmented absence management currently practiced by many employers is generally not conducive to effectively managing the case, accurately identifying the direct and indirect costs associated with the employee absence, or to compiling all of the information generated by the various entities. Employers are recognizing that it is extremely difficult to make good absence management decisions without knowing the actual costs associated with the employee absence or having access to the information generated by each entity involved in the process. Understandably, many employers are concluding that the absence management processes they currently follow are highly inefficient and relatively expensive to administer, and are not producing the desired level of improvement to the employer's profitability or the employee's care.